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Purpose – This chapter discusses the promise of and challenges to providing effective and culturally responsive trauma-focused mental health services to immigrant and refugee youth and their families within school settings.

Design/methodology/approach – This chapter utilizes “practice-based evidence” to outline successes and address the barriers associated with the implementation of school-based, trauma-focused, evidence-based interventions in four immigrant or refugee-dense cities: Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston.

Findings – Making cultural adaptations to identified trauma interventions that were consistent with community priorities, cultural norms, and values resulted in more accessible programs and greater engagement in treatment services.

Practical implications – The strategies tested in these real-world settings contribute to the development of culturally competent trauma-informed services for immigrant and refugee youth and their families. Mental health providers and program developers will better understand the need for multilevel engagement strategies and for culturally driven modifications when employing evidence-based programs with immigrant and refugee youth.

Originality/value – This chapter adds to the scarce evidence about useful methods to engage immigrant and refugee youth and families in treatment and to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes.

Public schools possess a unique constellation of opportunities and challenges for mental health service provision. Schools, as settings within a larger ecological context, can be a community institution that supports a child as s/he develops assets for resilient development while providing opportunities for a range of life choices. School is the setting where children can learn and practice peer relations and social norms, and it can be a refuge where children who have many environmental risks can find structure and effective methods of success (Doll, 1999). When Willie Horton, the infamous bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks, he responded, “Because that's where the money is.” At a most basic level, schools are where the children are. Every day more than 52 million students attend over 1,14,000 schools in the United States, and including the 6 million adult staff, this amounts to almost one-fifth of the population passing through the Nation's schools on any given weekday (New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, 2003).

Recently, a national priority has been set to improve mental health services for children and families. It has been identified in epidemiological literature that in the United States, an approximate 15% of youth meet diagnostic criteria for emotional or behavioral problems. Furthermore, less than one in every five children that present with such needs receive mental health services. Individual, family, and system barriers such as transportation, competing demands, and long waiting lists have negatively impacted access to mental health services. Therefore, the school system has become the “de facto” mental health system for children and adolescents, in part because of the significant time students spend at school. However, meeting the needs of students with behavioral or emotional problems within the school system poses its own challenges. Schools have reported being limited in their ability to deliver basic mental wellness to students due to the lack of available resources. Specifically, there is a shortage of school-employed mental health personnel and the ratio of student to mental health professional is two to three times larger than recommended. Expanded school mental health programs are partnered systems that utilize existing services and collaborate with community mental health (CMH) professionals at each level of the three-tiered system. This partnership enables CMH staff gain access to youth with emotional and behavioral problems, resulting in increased prevention and intervention services for students. Additionally, a coordinated effort such as student-transition services has an integral role of facilitating the process from the school system to postsecondary employment, training, and or additional education.

Building on the introduction to positive psychology and positive education in Chapter 1, the aim of Chapter 3 is to focus on wellbeing and positive education in secondary schools. This includes an overview of approaches to intervening in mental health (‘traditional’ and those which draw on the principles of positive psychology) that have been used in schools, and the factors that can influence their outcomes. When and how to apply interventions across three levels: the system, the community, and the individual, are also explored, alongside four different approaches: whole school, whole class, small group, and one-to-one. The chapter draws on up-to-date research and practical experience in secondary school settings, and includes a case study of Positive Psychology in Practice, based on the delivery (by the author) of a multi-component PPI (mPPI) – The Hummingbird Project, which has now been delivered to approximately 4,000 students in 24 secondary schools across the North West of England. The effectiveness of the mPPI, key lessons learned and insights gained are shared, including how to overcome the challenges of working in a culture not conducive to positive education.

Students with emotional and behavioral challenges are significantly impacted by mental health issues. Teachers and other school staff need mental health knowledge to work more effectively with these students. Collaboration with mental health professionals and sharing of information is essential.

In response to a critical need for uniform school crisis preparedness and response efforts across districts, the National Association of School Psychologists developed PREPaRE, a model and training curriculum aimed to equip school-based professionals to engage in comprehensive school crisis prevention and intervention practices. The PREPaRE acronym stands for: Prevent/Prepare for psychological trauma; Reaffirm physical health, security, and safety; Evaluate psychological trauma; Provide interventions (and) Respond to psychological needs; and Examine the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts. The model spans four crisis preparedness phases: Prevention, Mitigation, Response, and Recovery. This chapter provides a detailed overview of the development and structure of the PREPaRE model's core components and the organizational framework of the Incident Command System. It delineates elements of the basic school crisis response plan, assessment of mental health risk following a crisis event, and the provision of crisis interventions within a multitiered system of support framework. Additionally, it summarizes ongoing effectiveness and implementation research used to evaluate and improve the model based on immediate training outcomes assessed through pre and postmeasures and training transfer to applied school contexts. Implications for research and public policy regarding school safety and crisis prevention and intervention, as well as the future of PREPaRE curriculum development, are discussed.

Alternative education settings (AES; i.e., self-contained alternative schools, therapeutic day treatment and residential schools, and juvenile corrections schools) serve youth with complicated and often serious academic and behavioral needs. The use of evidence-based practices (EBPs) and practices with Best Available Evidence are necessary to increase the likelihood of long-term success for these youth. In this chapter, we define three primary categories of AES and review what we know about the characteristics of youth in these schools. Next, we discuss the current emphasis on identifying and implementing EBPs with regard to both academic interventions (i.e., reading and mathematics) and interventions addressing student behavior. In particular, we consider implementation in AES, where there are often high percentages of youth requiring special education services and who have a significant need for EBPs to succeed academically, behaviorally, and in their transition to adulthood. We focus our discussion on: (a) examining approaches to identifying EBPs; (b) providing a brief review of EBPs and Best Available Evidence in the areas of mathematics, reading, and interventions addressing student behavior for youth in AES; (c) delineating key implementation challenges in AES; and (d) providing recommendations for how to facilitate the use of EBPs in AES.

Latino youth represent more than one quarter of the overall public school population in the United States. For decades, Latinos have been found to perform significantly lower than their peers in standardized academic and some social and emotional measures. A unique subpopulation of this ethnic group, Latino Youth of Immigration (LYOI), has historically been underrepresented in the research literature, specifically, attempting to identify effective interventions that align with their unique social, emotional, and academic needs. In this chapter, we describe the unique sociocultural risk and protective factors for this population. In addition, we provide a brief synthesis of the extant literature on the sociocultural factors that researchers and practitioners need to address in partnership with the LYOI community when developing and implementing preventative programs. We emphasize the unique impact culturally responsive social and emotional learning (SEL) can have in this population. In addition, we provide models and examples on how school-based interventions can be implemented in a transformative manner for this vulnerable population, highlighting implications for researchers and practitioners to better collaborate with the LYOI community.

The relationship between learning and mental health, as well as a growing body of literature, underscores the need for art therapy in educational settings. This is particularly true for learners with special needs. Shostak et al. (1985) affirmed that “for children with special needs, art therapy in a school setting can offer opportunities to work through obstacles that impede educational success” (p. 19). School art therapy facilitates improved social interaction, increased learning behaviors, appropriate affective development, and increased empathy and personal well-being. It can be adapted to meet the specific developmental needs of individual students and to parallel students’ developmental, learning, and behavioral objectives. This chapter introduces the reader to the history and basic constructs of art therapy as a psychoeducational therapeutic intervention in schools. Model programs are identified, as well as the role of the art therapist within the context of K-12 education settings. Additionally, examples of special populations who benefit from art therapy intervention within school systems are provided, along with considerations for school-wide art therapy.

This study set out to examine whether personal religiosity was in any way associated with adolescents’ propensity to seek out formal mental health care.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), this study uses logistic regression models to test for an association between personal religiosity and mental health services use net of depressive symptomology and demographic controls.

Results showed a negative, statistically significant relationship between personal religiosity and mental health services use. Highly religious adolescents had lower odds of having seen a mental health professional compared to their less religious counterparts even after controlling for depressive symptomology.

Data restrictions required that we limit our analysis to one specific form of mental health services: talk therapy. Nevertheless, this study suggests that religiosity represents a potentially important consideration in addressing the mental health needs of adolescents.

To our knowledge, this is the first study in which a nationally representative sample of adolescents is used to examine the relationship between personal religiosity and mental health services use.